In coherent optical communication systems, one or more optical carriers of an optical signal are amplitude and phase modulated for transmission over a fiber from one point to another point. At a receiver, the received optical signal is mixed down with a local optical carrier, and the one or more carriers of the received optical signal are recovered using signal processing techniques.
Cycle clip is relatively common occurrence in coherent optical communication systems. Cycle slip involves undesired rotation of the received symbol constellation during processing in the receiver. In the receiver, there is a carrier phase estimator function/component used prior to decoding the received symbols. Cycle slip rate increases with increased bandwidth of the carrier phase estimator function, increased laser phase-noise at the transmitter, increased Amplified Spontaneous Emission (ASE) noise and increased Cross Phase Modulation (XPM) noise. Reducing the occurrence of cycle slip can improve the forward error correction decoding operations at the receiver.